AMD has dubbed Carrizo-L's CPU core as "Puma+" which is like Puma but with extra puma added (after all you can never be sure if one puma is enough)

Carrizo-L chips are 28nm product and shares the same socket with Carrizo.

The A8-7410 is a quad-core APU with a 2GHz – 2.5GHz clock and support for DDR3-1866, while the A6-7310 can manage 2.4GHz and only supports DDR3-1600.

The A4-7210 has a clock speed of 2.2GHz and the E2-7110 at 1.8GHz. All of the chips are quad cores, save for the E1-7010, which is a 10W, dual-core.

It is not clear if AMD's APU will match Intel's Atom until Cherry Trail and the A10-7410 are in the shops.

So far AMD never tried to compete with Atom but looked at giving better performance for higher end parts. This is why we saw netbooks powered by single-core Atom CPUs with graphics only an Intel Press Officer could love.

Carrizo-L will use significantly more power than Intel's Atom, though higher performance in many areas.

There is no information on graphics performance, but the 128 GCN cores and be better anything Chipzilla has. .

Puma+ will be the last SoC based on the Bobcat CPU architecture and it will be replaced by AMD's Zen.

AMD focused on Carrizo for the improvements it made to execution efficiency rather than anything cutting edge.

The block diagram of the new AMD Zen core has found its way onto the Planet 3 news group.

If the leak is accurate it compares the Zen, on the right, with AMD's upcoming and last Clustered Multithreading / CMT CPU core code named Excavator.Excavator is the last of AMD's Bulldozer family of cores and it will appear with AMD's Carrizo APU, which AMD claims will be the most power efficient mainstream APU.

Zen takes a more traditional AMD CPU layout similar to Phenom. There appears to be one integer cluster in a Zen core while there are two as in the Excavator. Bulldozer had a high integer throughput at the expense of floating point performance.

In Zen AMD uses a single fetch and single decode unit on the front end which is also a step back from Steamroller's double decoders that were introduced with.

It appears then that Zen will have a higher single threaded integer and floating point performance compared to Excavator and Bulldozer.

AMD has introduced a floating point that's twice as wide as that of Excavator. Featuring two FMAC 256-bit units. These will probably fuse and process 512-bit AVX floating point instructions. In Bulldozer this is carried out by two 128-bit FMAC units. They can process one 128-bit SIMD instruction each per clock or fuse to process a single 256-bit AVX instruction per cycle. So it looks like Zen's FPU will go the same way and allow both FMACs to cooperate and process 512bit AVX instructions.

Zen enables 512bit AVX support, and with the wider floating point unit can process less complex instructions at double the rate of Excavator. Historically AMD did well with floating point performance until Bulldozer so this will be a return to form.Zen features a 50 per cent wider integer pipeline vs a single Excavator core. Which will also dramatically improve the single threaded / per core performance of Zen.

Coupled with a more advanced 14nm process from Samsung/Globalfoundries the net result should be a significantly faster, leaner, smaller and more power efficient CPU core than Excavator.

We are expecting to see the products in the shops next year with more official information coming out in a couple of weeks.

Intel might be grabbing all the headlines with Ivy Bridge, but there’s a bit good news out of AMD as well.

European retailers have dropped the price of AMD’s flagship eight-core FX-8150 from €219 to about €180. This sounds like a very nice deal indeed, since the 3.6GHz behemoth now costs as much as Intel’s cheapest Ivy Bridge quad core, or a mid-range Core i5 Sandy Bridge part.

Sadly, it seems AMD did not cut prices across the range, only the 8150 is getting a discount, but this might be a sign of things to come. The company has not updated its official price list yet and there is a chance we will see similar cuts on other FX-series parts, or Llanos for that matter.

Let’s not forget, Trinity is just a few weeks away so this is probably not the best time to go for a Llano APU. Price cuts are in order and we will probably see some Llano bargains in a month or so.

AMD’s upcoming A10-5800K APU has apparently been put to the test and the benchmarks show mixed results. Of course, we cannot verify any of the results, so take them with a grain of salt.

The new Trinity based quad-core runs at 3.8GHz, but it overclocks to 4.2GHz on Turbo Core. It features 4MB of L3 cache and powerful HD 7660D graphics, all packed in a 100W TDP envelope.

Pitted against the Llano based A8-3850K, the new Trinity core shows superior GPU performance, but the CPU part doesn’t seem too impressive. In 3Dmark 06, Trinity scores 4303, while Llano manages 3814. The advantage widens in SM 2.0 tests, with 3285 marks versus 2139 and in SM 3.0 tests Trinity hits 4067, while the old Llano churns out 2552.

So it is great in GPU intensive tests, but overall it is not too impressive. In Super Pi it is only 12 percent faster than Llano, but Super Pi is not a very comprehensive benchmark.

AMD is expecting Trinity to deliver an overall performance boost of about 30 percent, but as far as we can gather, most of the improvement is down to the new GPU core, not the Bulldozer-derived Piledriver CPU core.

Microsoft has pulled a patch which would make its Windows 7 operating system play very nice with AMD's Bulldozer. The Patch was released on Friday and was supposed to offer support for SMT, a technology that AMD Bulldozer introduced.

SMT technology is not supported by any operating system and is one of the reasons Bulldozer has been getting pants reviews. Microsoft described the hotfix as the means to bring the 8-core chips to the level of performance they were supposed to show.

While this would have been all cool, it surprised the hell out of AMD and it seems that within 24 hours Microsoft pulled the patch completely. AMD said that "There are actually two updates needed for AMD Bulldozer CPU architecture and Microsoft just posted just the first patch one. Sadly the first one was not a lot of good without the second and AMD did not believe users would benefit in any way from it.

A spokesman said that the patch was originally scheduled for the first quarter 2012 and then the users will see tangible performance benefits when using Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems. Those who downloaded part one might want to consider uninstalling it and forgetting they ever saw it.

AMD’s Bulldozer has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately, so in an apparent effort to clarify some performance issues, the company revised Bulldozer’s transistor count, only to see the move backfire quite badly.

AMD told extremetech.com that its Bulldozer core does not feature 2 billion transistors as previously reported, but rather 1.2 billion. The die size remained unchanged, at 315 square millimeters, so it turns out AMD is only counting transistors actually used by the chip. It seems the other 800 million are looking for work on craigslist and dreaming of moving out of their mom's basement. AMD attributed the whole issue to a simple error, but the move raised more questions than it answered.

On one hand, it means AMD’s new architecture doesn’t really need 2 billion transistors to attain decent performance, on par with mid range Intel chips. However, the chip’s die size and transistor density indicate that it does have shedloads of unused transistors. Exactly how and why a few hundred million unused transistors ended up on the chip is another question. Extremetech believes they are the result of a fully automated design process gone amok, resulting in an “unusually high degree of overhead.”

The difference is quite significant and the site worked out that each of Bulldozer’s eight cores consists of 60 million transistors rather than 91 million. AMD did not comment the issue which is already proving somewhat awkward.

However, we believe it is essentially a positive development for AMD, as it shows Bulldozer still has a lot of room for improvement, 800 million transistors more to be exact. Future iterations could feature a lot more efficient design on the same die size, provided AMD irons out its design process. Yes, we are looking at you Piledriver.

Sources close to AMD have revealed that Trinity, the next generation of Fusion APU, is looking good.

Llano suffered from poor yields but it looks like Trinity has much better yields than its predecessor. We have already reported about the fact that CPU gets slightly faster than on Llano parts, but the graphics part ends up significantly faster.

Trinity should launch in Q1 2012 and hopefully nudge AMD off to a good start in what is expected to be a very challenging year spiced up with a lot of changes in the CPU market. We are still asking around, but all we are currently hearing is that 28nm Krishna and Wichita are most likely cancelled and that there won’t be any 28nm replacement.

Trinity is based on Piledriver, an enhanced Bulldozer core, but as you’ve probably seen by now, the desktop Bulldozer versions are not as fast as many have hoped for. However, Trinity is not aimed at the high end anyway, so the Piledriver core should suffice.

Trinity will probably do quite well in many desktop and notebook environments as it will be pretty affordable and it will offer good performance for the price.

A few weeks ago AMD introduced its latest FX-series desktop processors, based on the new Bulldozer architecture. The new series offered underwhelming performance and failed to impress AMD enthusiasts, although they tend to offer pretty good value for money.

Now it is time for Bulldozer server parts and sadly it turns out they are not much better than their desktop siblings. Punters had expected the server parts to be a tad more competitive, thanks to their emphasis on hyperthreading. However, this does not seem to be the case.

Ars Technica compiled test results from several sources and went out of their way to compare the cost of new Opteron-based server systems and Intel Xeon systems. Although Opterons did manage to offer superior performance against comparable Xeons in a TPC-C scenario, they end up costing about 50 percent more, yet deliver an 18 percent improvement in performance.

In SPEC JBB2005 Java emulation Opterons also fared well against Xeon parts, but they appear to offer little to no improvement over previous generation Opterons. In virtualization and HPC tests conducted by Anandtech, the Opteron 6276 failed to beat Intel’s Xeon X5670 and pretty much continued the underwhelming streak.

The biggest issue is the lack of a clear performance advantage over existing Opteron 6100 parts, so the new architecture doesn’t appear to offer much incentive to upgrade from the previous generation. Worse, the new Opterons struggle to compete with Intel Westmere EP parts, despite the fact that they have been on sale for a year and a half.

AMD has dropped the price of several Llano APUs as well as new Bulldozer processors in its latest price list.

The six-core FX-6100 saw its price cut from $165 to $155, which seems to make sense as AMD already has dirt cheap Thuban six-cores on sale.

Three Llano APUs also had a few bucks shaved off their price tag. The A4-3300 dropped from $69 to $66, while the A4-3400 went down from $75 to $71. The triple-core A6-3500 had its price cut from $89 to $85. Sadly the cuts are relatively small and they do not affect the most interesting quad-core parts.

AMD also included a new Llano-based chip in its lineup, the Athlon II X4 651. It’s a 3.0GHz part, sans graphics and the price stands at $92.

A set of leaked AMD slides sheds some new light on upcoming Trinity APUs, including some rather impressive clocks, both in the CPU and GPU department.

Trinity is based on AMD’s new Bulldozer architecture, or Piledriver core to be precise, and it seems the new silicon is pretty forthcoming when it comes to high clocks. Slides indicate that Trinity clocks will range from 2.2GHz to a rather high 3.8GHz. What’s more, with Turbo Core the fastest variants will hit 4GHz and 4.1GHz. Bear in mind that these are engineering samples, so clocks in final production versions could be a bit different.

Graphics clocks are equally impressive. Even the slowest 2.2GHz Trinity features a 600MHz GPU. For comparison, the Llano flagship A8-3800 features 600MHz graphics. Trinity takes things a step further and the fastest models have 711MHz and 709MHz graphics. The higher clocks are only part of the story. Trinity is said to utilize the VLIW4 graphics architecture, based on AMD’s HD 6000 series GPUs, so clock-per-clock performance should also be better.

There’s been much speculation about Trinity’s performance versus current Llano parts, as FX-series Bulldozer parts delivered underwhelming results compared to ancient Thuban CPUs. However, depending on who you ask, Trinity should be 20 to 30 percent faster than Llano in terms of CPU performance, while graphics performance see a 30 percent boost over current Llano GPUs. TDPs remain largely unchanged, most parts are rated at 65W and 100W, but some high-end versions will have a pretty high 125W TDP.